


First Impressions

by punkrockgaia



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos is a Dork, Cecil is a Dork, Dana is Rad, First Meeting, Kinda a little cute, M/M, Rated teen for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 19:25:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockgaia/pseuds/punkrockgaia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Carlos tries to be assertive based on some very false assumptions, Cecil flails wildly, and Dana is the awesome. Oh, and Carlos argues with his brain. A lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Impressions

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because I love awkward, adorkable Cecil and Carlos. I know that this doesn't really go along with the canon of the show as far as their first meeting, but the plot bunnies will lead one where they want, won't they?

_I wonder what he'll look like. These radio guys never look the way they sound,_ thought Carlos as he drove toward the low, squat building next to the blinking radio tower in the searing desert sunset. He remembered the shock he had felt when he found out that his favorite radio DJ on his favorite hard rock station back in Chicago was a skinny Asian guy who had been in his class in Junior High and not a Viking behemoth, as he had sounded on Metal Madness Mondays. This... This **Cecil** (probably not his real name, because come on, who was named Cecil?), he sounded all... sonorous and smooth ( _and sexy_ , chirped an unwelcome part of his brain), so that meant he was probably really, really ugly. And greasy. And unhygienic. And bald. In a pitted-out Hawaiian shirt. 

He grinned at the mental image. It wasn't really like him to be cruel or to make fun of somebody's physical appearance or level of personal cleanliness, but this... this **Cecil** had, in a few short days, become his nemesis. He'd earned this particular and unique distinction when he'd started broadcasting, loudly and repeatedly, how handsome and perfect he thought Carlos was, and claiming, of all things, to be in **love.**

Carlos was nobody's punchline.

Okay, it was certainly an unusual schtick, that was for sure. Way more unique than Stevie Chan speaking in a Norse accent and calling himself Thorr Thundarr. It was this whole whackadoodle Bizarro World Garrison Keillor deal, plus an "I have a big gay crush on the big gay scientist" thing thrown in for good measure. How had they even found out that he was into dudes? Was he that obvious? Well, however they found out, and whatever the hell the angle was supposed to be, he did not appreciate being a figure of fun.

 _But what if it isn't a schtick?_ that voice needled. _What if he really does like you like that?_ Carlos literally growled out loud in the quiet space of his car and slapped the steering wheel. "No. That does not happen. Not like this. And Jesus Christ, he lays it on so thick! It's obviously a bit that he's doing." For Christ's sake, the guy spewed effusive about high school football! He was probably a failed jock who never got over his own teen glory days and saw yet another chance to pick on a nerd. He grunted, picturing ugly, bald, sweaty, gross, smelly Cecil Palmer, who he had also decided was a homophobe, a racist and a misogynist, probably making gay jokes and all manner of racist jokes and sexually harassing the female staff.

He had worked up a full head of steaming hatred by the time he parked his Insight in the station parking lot. He never did this sort of thing, but he'd been listening to the radio and it happened **again** and he just had to do something about it. New town, new life, new Carlos. He wasn't going to sit by and take it while the whole town snickered at him. He was going to nip this in the bud, show that big blowhard, that... that **Cecil** , that he wasn't afraid of him. He stepped out of the car and into a wall of almost unbelievable heat radiating from the blacktop. It somehow only fueled his anger.

 _Cecil "Gross Jerk" Palmer, with his fucking NRA bumper sticker,_ thought Carlos, casting a gimlet eye over the cars in the parking lot, all of which, indeed, seemed to sport an NRA bumper sticker, some nonsense about being immune to bullets. Hicks. Hicks and rubes. For God's sake, he'd even seen a _white guy_ in a plastic feathered headdress today. 

He opened the glass door to the station, feeling the blessed frigid breath of an air conditioner, toward a reception desk staffed by a pretty, curvy, African-American woman in her 20s. _You poor thing, having to put up with that awful Cecil. He's probably terrible to you. I hope you sue his ass off some day._ She looked up as she heard him approach, and grinned radiantly.

"Oh! Oh my God. Wait, wait, don't tell me!" She made a shushing motion as Carlos made to speak. "That hair... That lab coat... You have **got** to be Carlos!" When he nodded, she put a hand to her ruby lips and giggled. "Oh my God, Cecil is going to _die_."

He nodded, in what he hoped was a grim and resolute manner. "Yeah, I bet I'm the last person he'd be expecting to see."

"You have that right!" She let forth a little squeal of a giggle again then put out her hand. "I'm Dana, by the way. I'm an intern here."

He shook her hand, grateful to have an ally. "Pleased to meet you."

"Do you want to go down to the booth? Cecil's live right now, but his show's over in about 15. You can wait, if you want."

"I'd be delighted." He had a few things to say to "Dirtbag of the Year" Cecil Palmer. He could wait 15 minutes, if that's what it took. 

"Great. I can't wait to see his face when he sees that you're here!" She grinned broadly and led him down the hallway. They passed by a door marked "Station Management," but judging from the silhouettes in the window and the sounds that passed under the laminate door, it was being used to store several large, vine-intensive plants ( _tentacles_ , whispered his mind) that were constantly and violently buffeted in the blasts of steam from a seriously malfunctioning industrial boiler, while the sound effects from Godzilla played on endless, ear-splitting loop. Weird. He noticed that Dana gave the door a wide berth as the passed. ( _Monsters_ , his mind insisted. _Shut up_ , he whispered back.)

It wasn't until they made their way down the hallway and away from the din issuing from the so-called "Management Office" that he could hear his archenemy's voice, broadcast through the small speakers set here and there against the ceiling.

 _What a fucking egomaniac,_ he fumed, even though deep in his heart he was sure that every radio station in the entire country, in the entire world, played their own shows in their offices. He didn't care. He wanted to think of that... that **Cecil** as a gross, egotistical asshole, and nothing would dissuade him.

They reached the end of the hall, where an illuminated sign proclaiming "ON AIR" blazed forth into the gathering evening dusk. There was a slightly-shabby sitting area with a faded blue couch with stained cushions and a water cooler and drip coffee maker, but the room was dominated by a large picture window.

 _Who the hell is that?_ Carlos thought, looking through the window, before realizing that he was gazing upon the mortal form of his nemesis, the man who had made his life miserable.

Oh. 

The man ( _this... this_ **Cecil** , his brain thoughtfully added) had his back to the huge window. He didn't look like Carlos had pictured, nor did he look like his voice. He looked... well, not like much of anything, from what he could see. He had the vaguest sense that he'd seen him somewhere before, maybe at the supermarket, or in the audience of the town meeting he'd called, but he couldn't be sure. He was, well, not nondescript, exactly, just... very very normal looking. At least from the back.

He was tipped back in an office chair, his hands gesticulating as he spoke, his feet up on the console. Those feet were wearing cream-and-tan wingtips. Moving upwards, he was wearing a pair of violently fuchsia socks, tobacco-brown, lightly tweedy dress pants, a white collared shirt, and a sweater vest with a complicated brown and olive green pattern. His skin had a soft tannish glow with pinkish undertones, the complexion of a genetically-peach person who incidentally found himself frequently in the sun. He was blonde, somewhere right in the middle of platinum and sandy, the hair shortish on the sides and longer and floppier on top. His sleeves were rolled up, and Carlos could see a hot pink paracord bracelet, long-fingered, restless hands, and wiry, veined arms ringed 'round with black tattoos. 

_I bet you were the edgiest guy in your frat, pretty boy,_ Carlos' mind hissed, shaking his attention away from those hands and arms and their jittery energy. He mentally replaced oily Hawaiian shirt Cecil with Cecil-as-the-rich-guy-villain-in-every-80's-teen-movie. (It was the hair, the hair and the wingtips.) He could see it now, this... this **Cecil** , laughing haughtily as he drove through rain puddles with his sports car, splashing the townies. Sure, the cars in the lot had been more 20-year-old VW Golf and Chevy Cavalier than high-ticket precision, but he wasn't going to allow that to ruin his fantasy of rage. 

The red steam stopped pouring out of Carlos' ears long enough to hear the man in the booth say "More updates on the temporal-spatial anomaly as they unfold. And now, the weather." Rather than a weather forecast, the man put on a CD of music, some sort of jangly indie-folk. Carlos figured that he'd fucked up and played the wrong track, and felt vindicated. He looked over at Dana, who was smiling and tapping her feet along with the tune. She turned to him.

"Oh, I'm so glad the heat wave's going to break, aren't you?"

"Huh?"

"The forecast! You must not have been paying attention. Distracted by the view, I guess." She nudged him in the side with her elbow, and then sat down on the couch and started to leaf through a stack of papers, humming.

Carlos blushed and turned his attention back to the window. Cecil had retrieved a Tupperware container from his desk, and had pulled out a three-inch stack of what appeared to be crackers, then proceeded to stuff the entire thing into his mouth. At least that's what Carlos assumed to have happened, as the hand with the crackers went up towards the face area, then came back empty right away. Then both hands came up to his throat in the universal choking gesture. Carlos started toward the door to the room (he might have been angry, but he wasn't just going to sit there and let the guy choke to death), but the man was already bent over the console, apparently Heimliching himself. It must have worked, because a heartbeat later and the man was spitting something into a napkin and shaking his head groggily, then flopping into the chair again, hand pressed to his forehead. Crisis averted, Carlos readjusted his lab coat and concentrated on getting angry again.

A moment later, the song ended, and the show was back on the air.

"Well, listeners, I'm glad to hear we're going to have much better weather for the quarterly Scrub Grass, Peyote, and Nameless Dread Festival this weekend, always a favorite with the kids..." His buttery voice betrayed no hint of the peril its owner had experienced a mere 30 seconds before. Carlos had to admit, the guy was good. Even if he was a stuck-up jerk. 

The show went on for another few minutes, with Cecil blathering about this or that with no apparent connection. The man had the attention span of a heavily-concussed chipmunk. Then he intoned "good night," spun a few dials, pushed a few buttons, and the ON AIR sign went dark as a pre-recorded show (described by Cecil as "a two-hour medley of America's best-loved industrial accidents") began to play over the airwaves.

Carlos, his moment of triumph nigh, began to lose his nerve. Who was he kidding? He was terrible with conflict. He backed silently down the hallway to the sounds of crashing machinery and muffled screams, hoping that he could maybe just sneak away without having to have it out with Mr. Radio Man. He couldn't see the door, but he could hear it slam open. Carlos cringed, fully expecting preppy-'80s-teen-movie-villain-Cecil to launch into a tirade on his beleaguered intern over some imagined offense. 

"Dana!" cried the voice, just a touch less mellifluous than it had been a moment earlier. "Did you see how my lunch tried to kill me?"

Carlos stopped his retreat, wrinkling his nose, then crept forward again. He could see Cecil in profile now. He appeared to be a few inches shorter than Carlos, and neither fat nor thin, but... efficient, as if he took up exactly enough space and not a molecule more. He judged his age to be in his mid-thirties, like his own. Clean-shaven, glasses (the type that had a heavy plastic frame on the top and wire rims on the bottom), and yes, floppy, wavy hair, and an utterly normal face. Like the kind of face you'd see next to the word "man" in a children's picture dictionary. That normal. Nose that looked like half a triangle in profile, eyebrows at the right height, neither too-thick nor too-thin lips. The only things remotely distinctive were a fine smattering of freckles over his nose and cheekbones, and a wild, wide-eyed expression on his face.

Dana looked up from her papers, smiling indulgently. "No, Cecil, but you have a visit--"

"I think," he continued, holding one index finger in the air in a "eureka" gesture, "I think it's that cheese spread I got from the Ralph's. I think there's something wrong with it. It's very sticky for cheese, Dana." He wagged his finger back and forth.

"Cecil, your cheese is not trying to kill you. Now if you're done being paranoid about lunch, you have a visitor."

He stopped mid-rant and cocked his head to the side. "Really? Who?"

Dana grinned like the Cheshire Cat. "Why don't you turn around and see for yourself?"

Cecil did as she suggested, and his eyes (purple irises, sparkling like the candied violets on his cousin's quinceanera cake, beautiful, or... or... colored contacts, yeah) fell on Carlos, and he blushed. Carlos had never seen a human being turn exactly that shade of red, at least not without fallout being involved. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but no words came out. Carlos briefly worried that perhaps a piece of cracker had lodged in his windpipe after all. 

Cecil made as if to nonchalantly lean on a nearby table, missed the table entirely, lost his balance, and whanged his knee off of the table leg with a painful sounding thunk. He grasped his knee in his hands and hopped on the other leg to the couch, sinking down onto the dubious-looking cushions. The entire time, he grinned like a loon. 

His smile was crazy, but somehow endearing, Carlos thought. Maybe it was the way he smiled with his whole face, no, his whole body. Or maybe it was the way that his top left second incisor was rotated clockwise roughly 27 degrees toward the first incisor, giving a cockeyed, almost scrappy air to his appearance that hadn't been evident before. Carlos had to push down a brief, vivid desire to trace that single crooked tooth with his tongue. He tried to say something, but he couldn't. A little "eep" escaped his lips.

Dana indicated Carlos with a nod. "Look, Cecil, it's Carlos." Cecil, similarly bereft of speech, wheezed. Dana glanced back and forth between the two men. "Well, this is certainly a stimulating conversation, but I have actual work to do. I'll be up at the front desk. Make sure you clean up any puddles you create, okay? That couch has been through enough." She smirked and sashayed out of the room. 

"You don't -- It's not -- Urgh!" Carlos called after her. She didn't turn around, only waved and disappeared around the corner. He turned back to Cecil, who was still sitting on the couch, frozen. Carlos cleared his throat and tried to find his voice.

"I, uh --"

"Are you here to do _science_?" Cecil interrupted, breathily.

"Uh, yes. Yes, I'm here to... uh... take measurements." Oh, God. That sounded like a line out of a porn, didn't it? He fumbled around in his pocket and produced his phone, which had a Star Trek tricorder app on it. He waved it around and it made odd bleeps and bloops.

Cecil beamed. "Oh, how exciting!"

"Yes, well, uh..." He glanced at his phone, hoping it wouldn't ring and spoil the illusion, such as it was. "Oh, very interesting. Yes. I need to get back to the lab." He hurriedly stuck the phone back in his pocket and started back down the hallway.

Cecil called after him. "Carlos, wait!" 

Carlos turned to see Cecil walking toward him, hobbling slightly. "Are you okay? Did you injure your knee?"

Cecil looked bemused. "Oh! Oh... I don't know!" He paused for a moment, considering, then met Carlos' eyes with an expression of gratitude normally reserved for last-minute death-row pardons. "But it's _so very kind_ of you to ask. You are a kind and thoughtful, beautiful man!"

Carlos had no idea how to respond. "Oh, uh, well..."

He was saved from his quagmire by Cecil pressing a business card into his hand. His fingertips were soft, cool and slightly damp. Instead of being creepy and clammy, this was somehow comforting. "Here's my card. You can call me anytime. For, uh, science and things. Of course. Or if you want to get coffee. Or a drink. Or a pizza. Or something. Or, uh, oh, look at the time!" He glanced up at a clock, which seemed to not actually be working. "I'd better get ready for the next news update! Thanks for stopping by!" He pumped Carlos' hand vehemently, then returned to his booth at what would have been a sprint, save for the limping. 

Carlos watched him go, a funny dizzy feeling inside his head and a warmth in his chest. He walked back to the lobby in a haze, to find Dana, still smirking, at the desk. He remembered her parting words and began to stammer.

"We, uh, didn't do anything back there, there's, uh, there's nothing going on with us..."

She snickered. "I know, I'm sorry. I was just being... crass, I guess. I like to get a rise out of Cecil once in a while. He gets so flustered; it's kinda cute."

 _Cute, yes. Cute and... weird. More weird than cute. Yes. Just remember that._ "Is he -- Is he quite right? In the head?"

"Hmm... Yes, yes, I'd say so," said Dana after a moment's thought. "That's just Our Cecil." He could hear the capital "O" in her voice. "He kind of -- flings himself forward through life. That's how he is. And he's got no filter between his brain and his mouth and no shields on his heart." She paused, then leaned toward him, lowering her voice. "And... Hm, how to say this?" Carlos felt a moment of panic that she would either ask him out or tell him to keep his hands off her man. She looked down at her paperwork and took a deep breath. "Okay. Here goes. I don't know how you swing, and if you're not interested in him, then fine, okay, you're not interested. But don't mess with him, you know? You mess with him, and there'll be a lot of people taking numbers to kick your ass. And I'll be first in line." She looked down at her papers, then back up at him, smiling sweetly. "You have a nice evening, now!"

"Yeah, yeah, uh, nice evening..." Carlos muttered, then staggered out to the parking lot. He slipped into the driver's seat of his car and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. He realized that he still clutched Cecil's card in his hand. He looked at it, blinking. It was purple, and it reminded him of Cecil's eyes. ("Colored contacts. I'm sure of it," he growled, before his brain could start waxing rhapsodic.) Speaking of eyes, there was one in the upper-left-hand corner of the card, staring at him. The card read:

CECIL G. PALMER, VOICE  
NIGHT VALE COMMUNITY RADIO

A land line and a cell number followed.

Not announcer, not news anchor, not host, but "voice." What the shit did that mean? Oh, well, it was probably the least confusing thing that had happened all day. Apparently, he'd been all wrong, about nearly everything. How had he let his objectivity slip so badly? He was a scientist, so why had he allowed himself to develop such a detailed, misguided set of preconceived notions?

It's just that this place was so _strange_. He couldn't get his bearings, somehow. Every time he thought that he saw the big picture, it would blur on him, and, by the time his vision cleared, it would have changed completely. But he couldn't allow himself to get distracted.

He glanced toward the station again, just in time to see a blushing face peering out of the window, a blushing face that quickly disappeared behind the curtain. The vertiginous, buzzing feeling returned. 

And no more emotional overreactions. This was getting ridiculous. From here on out, he was strictly business. No more getting all twisted up over this town and this... this... this...

This **Cecil**. 

Shaking his head, he put the car into drive and pulled out into the flow of traffic, and the radio tower twinkled in the rearview mirror like it twinkled only for him.


End file.
